Commissioner Ellen Berlinger has this crime scene a feeling: she knows that the well-trained man with a prison tattoo is a murderer. Far and wide, nobody but her can even see a crime, but still, she saw it when she looked the man in the eye, she explains to her colleague, the gentle but never boring Rascher (Sebastian Blomberg): “I can behind I can’t go back to that moment of realization. I know it.” The episode from Mainz is then logically called “In his eyes”, and Berlinger says that with her feelings in this thriller about as often as Kate Sharma in Bridgerton says she is really leaving for India now though.
Written by Thomas Kirchner and directed by Tim Trageser, the episode is about the love life of two widows over 60 and sex with a much younger man. Good contemporary topic actually, but of course there must be crime in the air right away when a woman claims the same age difference downwards that the average serially monogamous man of advanced age very rarely has to atone for in the film.
In any case, this one draws its tension crime scene from the question of whether the widow Charlotte Mühlen rightly finds her new relationship with the muscular Hannes Petzold wonderful and loving. Or if only a reprieve separates her from the realization that she is in fact a poor victim. Bibiana Dubinski, the other widow, is already dead by this point. Berlinger sets the tone when he first meets Ms. Mühlen (Michaela May) and Mr. Petzold. “Your son?” she asks dashingly. And when Mühlen in love announces that this is her “majordomo”, Berlinger corrects: “More likely your gigolo.” One briefly waits for a punchline against prudery, but no, this isn’t it Grace and Frankie.
Charlotte (Michaela May, left) is happy and tells her rich friend Bibiana (Ulrike Krumbiegel) about it.
(Photo: Peter Porst/SWR)
Sweethearts just have a hard time on German television. Since the engagement of Heike Makatsch as Berlinger was celebrated as an event by ARD six years ago, the investigator has not been particularly cared for; she has only just her fourth case, and in it she despairs rather tiresomely of her own stubbornness.
After all, Hannes Petzold (Klaus Steinbacher), the alleged gigolo, remains unpredictable; at times it is actually exciting how this thriller balances on the fine line of doubt. But then, of all women, it becomes a cliché, the rich, plastic-operated Bibiana (Ulrike Krumbiegel) with her sex toy becomes more and more dubious after her death, the cake-baking mother Charlotte more and more sad, and with that he goes crime scene for purification in the summer break.
The first, Sunday, 8:15 p.m.
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